A Separate Peace
by elveljung
Summary: The Starlights return. Mamoru makes his peace. Post S5, Mamoru POV. Seiya/Usagi, Haruka/Michiru.


**Ever After/A Separate Peace**

Mamoru has read the stories, he knows how they end. The prince saves the princess, and she loves him.

"Boring," Chibi Usa objects, looking up at him with the dismissive impatience of a girl who did not survive a lonely childhood on the knowledge that she was part of a great love story, and so would one day be entitled to a happy ending.

"I suppose," he says. He wanted a family, more than anything, and here she is.

"She just lay there," Chibi Usa continues, in the strident tones of someone still not used to being listened to. "So boring. Sailor Moon would _never_."

"No," Mamoru agrees, and it's true.

Usagi, in distress though she may often be, has never been part of the adventure as the hero's damsel. She's not – and he can see it dawning on Chibi Usa, the discomfort of not knowing how to take it back without acknowledging that it was said – she's not the one who is abducted, rescued, whose value is contingent on being valued by someone more important.

It's better, if she were only a little older she would understand that it's better, to leave unsaid who is.

"Mamo-chan…"

"It's fine." And it is. He's made his peace. Mostly because he doesn't know how to fight it, anymore, but all the same: peace.

He strokes Chibi Usa's hair until she falls asleep, curled tight on her side and just shy of too old to let him.

xxxxx

When he goes out afterwards the evening air is heavy with residual sunlight: it's summer now and almost peace. It's good, very good, to be back in Japan, in his body.

He can feel the pull of Usagi's presence, a golden imperative just under his skin every time he transforms. She's out as Sailor Moon tonight, probably with the girls.

He's always known where she is.

Tonight he goes in the opposite direction, at random initially, then towards a growing sensation of threat.

The enemy – they don't have a name for them yet, not that Mamoru has ever felt there was much difference between a youma and a daimon – is loitering around a parking lot. They're strong, these manifestations of … he's not yet sure what kind of evil.

He takes a rose from inside his cape – from where, until he reached for it, there was no rose. He is alone, and Sailor Moon does not feel his distress the way he does hers.

Rather, he thought he was alone.

The energy equivalent of an earthquake slams into the monster, which screams high and pure as pain but doesn't stop. Instead it gains speeds, rushing towards the sudden blond gleam that will be Sailor Uranus.

Mamoru throws the rose, which makes the enemy sidestep, but not slow down.

It's not a surprise, really. It shouldn't be.

Another earthquake rocks it instead, and a wave from the deepest darkest part of the sea. Places no man could see, where the creatures don't have eyes and could never dream of air.

Then there is no monster.

And he's not surprised.

He can barely keep up with an Inner.

"Tuxedo Kamen," Haruka-san says, smirk-grinning up at him until he jumps down off the roof. "Yo."

He nods. "Sailor Uranus." His rose still pierces the asphalt at his feet, although by morning it will have disintegrated. The earth will be fertile where it stood, will push grass up through the cement. It will be mowed down. "Where's your other half?"

"Did you hear that, Neptune?" Haruka-san says, in that teasing tone at the very edge of kindness. She speaks her words so lightly, barely allowing the possibility of meaning. "He doesn't think we can go anywhere without each other."

"Oh really," comes Michiru-san's voice, soft as her steps behind him. "Are you suggesting co-dependence?" But when he turns his face towards her she's smiling, that pretty society smile that means nothing. "Good evening, Tuxedo Kamen-san."

Ami always makes him think of floating. With Michiru-san, he can't but think of drowning.

She is, to be frankly uncomfortably honest, a lot like he'd originally imagined the princess, with her light grace and quiet authority. Of course, although this is a particularly awkward thought when she's in the sailor suit, Haruka-san is quite a bit like he'd imagined the prince. Forceful. Playful. An outspoken leader.

He'd never dared to dream of Usagi's warmth, about a love simple and heavy as accepting the inevitable.

Beside him, Michiru-san's speaking to Haruka-san. "There's still something disturbing the sea. Something's coming."

Haruka-san nods. "Yes. The wind hasn't settled either."

A moment passes, enough time for him to resolve to follow them, before Haruka-san says, "There. Did you…?"

"Yes. Of course. It's – oh." Her hand relaxes its hold on Haruka-san's arm.

He can't read Haruka-san's expression, which is nothing new really. "Oh indeed."

But he can feel it too. Something new has come, something alien. Threatening, even – the strength of it, if not the intent. Ever since the revival of Elysium, he's been more finely attuned to the Earth, more protective of it. Really it hinders him more than it helps.

"Well," Haruka-san says, wry amusement and carefully nothing else. "She'll be happy."

"She will." They say _she _in that way they all have, he too, that can only mean one person. "Let's go make our greetings."

xxxxx

When they arrive on the scene they're irrelevant. The ground is dusted with the remains of a monster, but that too is irrelevant.

Usagi's face is wide open, her fingers clenching around the sudden emptiness as the tier fades back into liminal space. "Seiya!"

And there.

He's not entirely unfamiliar, the young man in the eye-sore red suit. Mamoru remembers the simple smile that tried and failed to cover up all the complications, and the ponytail. The aura of something familiar, familial – _a sailor solider_ – and something utterly incomprehensible, something not meant be here – _an alien_.

It had been a shock, the first time he saw them transform. For such a long time his life has been defined by not being a sailor solider, which has been something like all right because he doesn't really want to be a girl, and then suddenly it was possible after all, for other people.

Seiya's mouth quirks at the corner. "Dumpling." He must be aware of them watching but he doesn't let on.

"I… _Seiya_."

They take a few slow steps towards each other, like they're walking on ice and not sure it will hold. So often Usagi moves like a foal, with grace that disappears the moment she notices her own movement. Now there's silence, starlit and strained, until Usagi laughs, that screeching uncontrollable laugh that always pierces him, and runs to Seiya.

It's like watching children, every movement abrupt and almost desperate.

Seiya catches her, their hands shaking and wild around each other's, every finger locked around wrist, palm, sleeve. It's a while before Mamoru notices that there are tears dripping ignored down her face. "What are you even doing here? I thought – I never thought I'd see you again!"

"Yes," Haruka-san says beside him, milder than he'd have expected, although that doesn't mean much. "What are you doing here?"

Seiya and Usagi step apart, although her hand doesn't leave his arm, fingers curled tightly on his sleeve. He's smiling, though. "Ah, it's the migration police. Am I in for an expulsion?"

"Depends, are you here to steal our jobs?" There's some tension to the teasing, but it's teasing all the same. They're all smiling, although it might be partially about showing teeth.

"Oh, but you gave her to me, didn't you?"

"Seiya!" It's Usagi protesting, pink-cheeked and uncertain, which means, which must mean, that it's true.

He thinks it's perhaps preferable that they're interrupted before Haruka-san can reply.

"Ah, there you are. Really, Seiya, always running off…" It's the pale one, in sailor form, the one who looked girly even as a boy.

xxxxx

The explanations, such as they are, come later, when they're all assembled at the Hikawa Shrine. Mamoru's never been quite at ease there, in this place that is so very much Rei's. He can't quite remember why he went out with her – a lot of his past decisions are hazy, everything that happened before the silver crystal reawakened Endymion distant and blurred, but dating Rei stands out as especially preposterous. She's not his type or, even more obviously, his age: a loud, insistent schoolgirl. Maybe that intensity was what drew him, maybe he was looking for something in this world, in this time, to ground him. Everything was falling apart and he was so angry and so desperate.

That's not a fair way to treat a person but he was never serious about her and she can't have really cared – god knows she handed him over to Usagi like last season's accessories.

He doesn't look at her now, if he can help it, and her eyes are fixed on the princess at the head of the table.

"I suppose in the end," Taiki says, "you can't go home again."

Princess Kakyuu sighs, looking down momentarily at her hands, which are knotted around each other in her lap. She's all firelight, hotter and redder than the silver glow of the Moon Princess. "Galaxia had… annihilated it. The energy lines are twisted. There isn't – it cannot sustain life."

"Oh," says Usagi, and he takes her hand automatically because her face twists with the terror of it. "Oh no."

There is a long moment of silence, of slow horror.

"So," Seiya says with a big grin, catching her eye and holding it, steady and sure. He's the kind of guy, Mamoru is coming to realise, whose last words to Galaxia would have been a quip, there on the edge of the world. "Here's where we're hoping you have a generous immigration policy."

There's a lot of mumbled reassurance, of reaching hands. Luna slips under the table and curls up in Yaten's lap.

Taiki's eyes remain on Haruka-san and Michiru-san, seated at the edge of the group. Clearly he knows whose assurance will be needed

Clearly he's prepared to fight for it, but the silence of the Outers is subdued, even saddened. "Isn't that what we all are," Haruka-san says at last, in a low voice.

Michiru-san fills in, "Aliens. Princesses of dead planets."

Seeing the quick look between Seiya and Haruka-san, Mamoru knows with sudden leaden certainty that the Starlights were the Outers of their galaxy, and so much suddenly makes sense. The Inners… well, Princess Kakyuu doesn't have any Inners, anymore.

Makoto lets out a nervous laugh. "Got all sad now, huh."

Rei gives her an appalled look; Minako laughs.

So, after a moment, does Yaten. "Yeah, anyway, it looks like you could use a hand with those monsters."

Mamoru has the irrational urge to say that they do not. He was never one to advocate an alliance even with the Outers, and they at least are from his galaxy.

But the Starlights are, he thinks, like Haruka-san and Michiru-san. They will be able to do things he can't. Protect his planet in ways he can't.

He wonders for a moment what he would have been like, his life, if he had been tied to one of those groups, been one of the pragmatic adults instead of…of being linked to the Inners, however tenuously. He can't even wonder, anymore, what his life would have been like if it had remained mundane, it's too unreal.

"Anyway," Ami says softly, possibly to prevent any retort from Haruka-san, "it is good to have you back."

"Yeah," Minako agrees, "it's, like, preventing a fangirl mass suicide!"

The conversation meanders off, in the bright, loud, random way that's normal for the girls. Mamoru can't follow it.

He sees Haruka-san and Michiru-san to the door. That's another conversation he's not part of, humming in the silence between them.

For some reason he'd expected the same of the Starlights, that they too would be thrown by the Inners, but when he returns all eight of them are shouting and shoving at each other, even Taiki.

He sits down beside Princess Kakyuu, whose soft dry smile is very different from Usagi's. She seems older, perhaps because while they are both princesses who have fought and survived, only Kakyuu has staked everything and lost.

"It will," she says softly, into her tea cup, "perhaps be possible to recover our planet, in time. In generations to come. Most of my energy remains there, in an – I am attempting to heal it. Alleviate what has occurred. So perhaps one day…"

One day, hundreds of thousands of years after everyone she ever knew has died, after the massacre of the billions of people she could not protect.

"I hope so," he says.

She sips her tea. "That is kind of you to say." Then, putting the cup aside, "It is time we left."

She stands up the way Usagi stands up when she's going to de-transform, like she's putting away something heavy and precious, but of course she doesn't change. Princess Kakyuu was born Princess Kakyuu, any mundane form would be nothing more than a disguise.

Mamoru isn't always sure which is the real one, the new life stretched tight over a past he can still barely remember, or the memory-self stirring underneath.

He finds himself asking, standing up too, "What are you going to do?"

When he asks the girls these kinds of questions, they are kindly; a sort of guide for them, a roadmap to answers. Now, with this adult woman from a hundred thousand million miles away, it comes out almost a demand, for all his voice is soft.

She smiles thinly, eyes dark over the bright red lipstick. "I thought perhaps I might become a diplomat. Or a dentist. I have always liked teeth."

Outside, a little apart under the trees, Usagi and Seiya embrace.

Luna gives him a long, wary look, but Mamoru shakes his head, walks away with the others – they are friends, and Usagi is the kindest person Mamoru has ever known, and Seiya stepped unhesitatingly between her and danger, and now his home is lost: what kind of monster would begrudge them?

Only later, thinking back on the meeting, does it occur to him that he didn't say anything.

xxxxx

Weeks after his return to Japan, a mailman arrives with a sack of forwarded letters, courtesy of the American roommate he never actually met. He glances through them, smiles: pages upon pages of Usagi scribbling and doodling her love.

That is how he thinks of them, very consciously: as devotion, not as evidence that he wasn't essential enough to need to stay, like Ami proved to be when offered herforeign scholarship, proof that he could disappear unnoticed.

Then when he's putting them away it catches his eye, and suddenly it's on every page, a name framed by exclamation marks or little stars or underlinings, and he does not put the letters away half-read after all.

Pages upon pages of Seiya did and Seiya said and Seiya thought, so much of Seiya that even Usagi, always dense about boys, has to spend many paragraphs reassuring him that it's not like that. Seiya took her to a club and for a moment she was afraid that – she thought that – but it's not like that. Seiya teased her and believed in her and talked to her about strange stars – but it's not like that. Seiya is the kind of person and loves her in the kind of way that means not revealing his deepest secrets felt like a lie – but of course it's not like that.

He's an honest kind of guy, Seiya. The first, brief time they met Mamoru said with his eyes, _you are in love with her_. Seiya shrugged, smiled, _that was never a secret_. They shook hands. They wished each other all the best. They even meant it.

He flicks through the one hundred and sixteen letters Usagi wrote him about how the others are worried about Seiya, and how Seiya sang to her, and how she misses Seiya, and how Seiya made an idiot of himself in school, and how Seiya and she were on the roof, but of course – the paragraph is crossed out.

Gradually, he understands from the girls that things were – muddled. It takes him longer to understand that Seiya is friends with them.

They're so uncomfortable, and they know so much – and at first he thinks, half amused half horrified, _but have they been spying…?_ – and then he sees Ami leaning close over a book and incidentally to Taiki, sees Taiki and Makoto nodding knowingly at each other outside the greenhouse; sees Minako fawning over Yaten and Yaten laughing at her, sees Rei and Seiya pointing fingers and teasing each other.

The Starlights are friends and far beyond that, as any group of sailor soldiers, that could never be anything but obvious. But that they're so close with the Inners, so much part of the group… more so, really, than the Outers have ever been, certainly more so than Mamoru.

Mamoru hasn't had friends since that first month when reality started tilting, when his classmates were still talking about chemistry tests and parties and extra jobs, and his mouth was too full of _moon princess _and _lost love _and _I used to be a prince _to fit any mundane replies, and he couldn't speak.

Even now he still doesn't quite know how to talk about the weather and career options and new coffee places and mean it. _I'm through the looking glass_, he told Reika, last time he was over for dinner. They haven't invited him since, even though he's pretty sure Reika thought he was talking about military research, some shady government project, although really he was never good enough to be eligible for that, not even when university still mattered to him, certainly not now.

He can't have human friends because he's on the far side of the looking glass, and the Inners are bewildering, family certainly but wild little girls. He's an afterthought to them, like a kindly uncle, his Christmas invitation remembered at the last minute.

Sometimes, now, he remembers the Shitennou, and thinks perhaps he used to belong with them. They're dead now, though, partially at least because of his decisions and his ineptitude. Usagi wouldn't have done that, he thinks. She would have known them as hers, and would have saved them somehow. He can't regret any of it, ultimately.

In the end he speaks to Minako, and for no good reason. For no good-reasons like Rei is off limits, Makoto has always been the least approachable of them, and he's uncomfortable making Ami uncomfortable. They're outside the Crown, the wind whipping her hair. Since she first revealed herself, when there were already so many of them and he was even further away from them than he is now, she's appeared to him as though at a distance, as a smaller, lesser version of Usagi. Blond and easy, laughing at her strange jokes and running away from school, after cute boys.

Today too there are a lot of words pouring out of her, but little of substance. However between the deviations and the giggles he is given to understand that they were sexually aware of Seiya, the girls. That Minako, who stalks good-looking boys with Usagi as a matter of course – staked Haruka-san, if he's not misremembering –

perceived that she needed to crash the party when Seiya was visiting, to prevent some sort of unspeakable scandal.

There is also, perhaps more startlingly, a certain respect for Seiya, for his feelings. Minako too mentions a rooftop in the rain, and then abruptly won't say any more.

Presently he feels the need to know what happened at the end, with Galaxia, but the Inners were dead then, and he can hardly go ask Haruka-san or Michiru-san.

"I'm sorry," he says. It's even true. "I didn't mean to pry."

She smiles up at him, a strangely haggard expression. "It's fine. I understand, you know. I was the only one, for a long time. I'd never go back to that."

There's so much damage suddenly, so much more than he'd anticipated. Abruptly, vividly, in one of those flashes like a sudden cold, he remembers her as the uncontested leader of the Inners, and equally abruptly, equally vividly, sees why that is in the past now.

xxxxx

It's simpler when, days later, it's Luna. In a strange sense they have always spoken to each other as one adult to another.

Luna too has made a virtue of necessity: she watches. She used to have a body once, a position, that lent itself to action, but that was a thousand years ago. Now the complementary feline form and half a head of absence, of memory that will never be recovered and can never be replaced, form the parameters of her existence.

She too has made her peace, made a place for herself in the world. It's just a smaller place than it used to be.

She isn't even really Usagi's guardian anymore, more like an outgrown governess.

In the ends she snubs him with extreme politeness. Well, he always knew she was Usagi's, the same way he is Usagi's.

"For a long time," she says, "I was – how was it you put it? That time with Motoki-san, when he asked you…"

That time Motoki had got a little drunk, nervous and giddy with thoughts of Reika's return, and finally asked, baffled apparently, what the hell Mamoru was doing with a little girl? They're tiny, I mean they're sweet but – they're teeny tiny little babies, what are you doing, you're a grown man.

"I said," Mamoru says in the present, "I'm waiting for her to grow into herself."

"Yes," says Luna. "Precisely that." She looks at him a little sideways, careful suddenly, far from the blunt way she speaks to the girls. "I am satisfied, now, that she has. More than that – she's… she's outgrown the person she was then."

Then – a thousand years ago, longer than a human mind can possibly imagine, when she died at fourteen, younger than she is now and untouched by adversity.

Luna sighs. "I'll take Usagi's word over my own. About the Starlights, too."

He looks at her as Endymion would have looked at her, maybe. There's nothing to say, so they sit there in silence heavy as a thousand years, until Usagi bursts through the door.

"Mamo-chan!" She clings to his arm, rests her forehead against his chest. Only briefly does she look up into his face.

This, it comes to him, is normal for them. Perhaps because she has noticed that he is not the type of man who likes to look directly at the sun.

xxxxxxx

"Could you get Chibi Usa?" Usagi asks, looking up from her communicator. She's sitting on his sofa, playing absently with her sleeve. "Mum wants her home for dinner."

"Sure. Of course." He reaches for his jacket. "That was Luna?"

"Yeah. Another monster. I should…" She sighs, and he half expects an indignant rant about the enemy ruining date night, but it doesn't come. Even if Luna hadn't called, she'd have left to go collect Chibi Usa any minute. The transformation brooch is in her hand, but then she laughs, putting it away. "I'd better not. The wings catch on everything, I'd wreck your flat!"

He smiles. "Where am I picking her up?"

"Hmm? Oh, Seiya's." She stands on tiptoe to kiss his cheek, before hurrying away. He can hear her sprinting down the staircase, grumbling under her breath about how mad Rei-chan will be if she's late.

At a far more sedate pace, Mamoru too wanders downstairs. He has never visited the Three Lights mansion, though he's aware the girls are often there. He just hadn't realised that included his daughter.

The bus brings him to the unsurprisingly ostentatious house. Usagi calls it nice and big, when she refers to it; Seiya laughs, says it's difficult to get it cleaned, to have maids over without them figuring something out or stealing underwear. At which point Usagi makes a face, _Who'd want your dirty underwear, you pervert!_

_Oh, you _wish_ you had my dirty underwear! _He advances a step, playfully, tucks down his trousers a little to display the hem of his underwear, always ridiculously patterned. _I'm a fashion god! These sell for thousands on ebay, I'll have you know!_

_No way!_ Usagi's flabbergasted face, her hand in the air between them as though reaching to touch them.

It is a nice house, and a big one. Mamoru shows his face to the camera at the gate and is buzzed in immediately.

It's Seiya on the other side of the door, in a frankly horrifying neon-red suit and with Chibi Usa on his hip. Chibi Usa's holding on to a teddy bear he doesn't recognise and also to Seiya's shoulder.

He wouldn't have been surprised to see affectionate Chibi Chibi in this position, but – apparently misinterpreting his look, Chibi Usa blushes, gesturing with the toy. "It's a collectible!"

"All right," Mamoru says, reaching out to take her from Seiya, who just laughs at the exchange. "Are you ill?"

"Scratched up her knee," Seiya says, and inching the school skirt aside a little Mamoru can see the mighty heap of band aids. "It was stupid of me to play catch so close to the staircase."

"I'm fine!" Chibi Usa snaps, still red-faced. "You can let me down, you know."

"Sure."

She huffs, patting her skirt and leaving the toy bear inside as she slips away into the garden.

Mamoru is aware, has been for some time, that Seiya, who comes over all the time, has charmed Usagi's parents to the point they're completely smitten with him. That he's boisterous isn't a problem to people who've raised such a daughter.

Mamoru knows he should have made more of an effort, himself. He's just always felt slightly silly about it – the connection between him and Usagi was forged a thousand years before these people were born, when he aimed to win over Queen Serenity. Anyway Usagi's father reminds him of one of his thesis advisors, a youngish teacher he became not-quite-friends with.

He thinks he could get along with them well as co-workers, in a situation where he didn't have to pretend so much.

It comes to him that Seiya is sixteen too, and doesn't have to pretend: that Seiya fell in love with Tsukino Usagi, that Seiya has never met Serenity.

Mamoru knows all this. He just hadn't expected Seiya to charm Chibi Usa, too – hadn't expected him to want to.

"Thanks for looking after her."

Seiya waves this away. "No problem, no problem."

"I hope it wasn't too much trouble."

"It's good for Yaten's toy crap to meet an actual child on occasion."

Mamoru glances involuntarily at the bear. It reminds him of a much smaller one he's seen in Usagi's bag. While she has a ton of them at home, she usually only carries around the ones he's given her.

"Is the princess staying here as well?"

"No." Seiya sobers now, the smile slipping away for the first time. "Maybe you say it in the papers? The press was going crazy, and anyway she's not – she's used to a different way of life."

"I can imagine."

There is no place on this Earth remotely similar to the life she is used to. Perhaps she simply isn't used to living with the Outers – and while Usagi loves her Outers dearly, prolonged exposure does tend to lead to certain rifts.

Through the open doorway, he can hear Chibi Usa laughing. Because of her, he knows, it does not actually matter if Usagi and he love each other. He wonders sometimes whether Usagi's figured this out yet, about what will happen when she does.

It feels perverse, that he can't stop poking this wound. "How are you settling in?"

"Oh, pretty well. It's a good planet."

"I think so," Mamoru says mildly.

Seiya laughs, maybe embarrassed, then sombers again. Shrugs. "It was a good place we came from, maybe better than this." It's said with the same kind of nostalgia Mamoru harbours for the Silver Millennium. "No illness, no wars, everyone had what they needed. But this democracy thing, I like it. People getting to make up their own minds, without anyone knowing better."

"Perhaps," Mamoru says, surprised. People tend, unfortunately, to make very bad decisions. "I should be going."

xxxxx

They're barely a block away when the early evening turns nightly and ominous. Chibi Usa's hand stiffens in his for only a second – not long enough for him to capture it – before she frees it to transform.

He remembers a time when he was the one she turned to: the safe adult, the anchoring family. But she's grown away from that now, and might one day have little regard for what he has to say, might look only to the other sailor soldiers.

She's here, in this time, for practice at that, in part at least, but these monsters are not for practicing. He's can't be the only one who's told her that. Obviously he's not the only one she doesn't listen to.

He grabs her around the waist, sweeps her with him up to the relative safety of a lamp post. Not for the first time, he suspects these dark creatures can sense energy, is drawn to the sailor soldiers.

If he were alone, he'd be fine, but now there is Chibi Moon to consider. Before he understands what's happening, before he can understand that she would attempt this, she's wiggled free of his arm and is back on the ground.

His mind is blank with denial.

He supposes, distantly, that she's used to fighting with the sailor soldiers, who can let her try things like this in the certainty of being able to protect her when she fails.

"Chibi Moon! Come back!"

But she's already readying her attack, and he wants to cry. It's cute, another time it would be cute, that she thinks it will have any effect at all.

He throws himself forward, gets a rose through the monster's forehead and himself in between its attack and Chibi Moon.

The impact rolls them, they end up at the foot of the lamp post.

"Tuxedo Kamen! Tuxedo Kamen!"

If he could speak yet, he would tell her not to do this, would tell her that she must run, seek shelter, be a good little rabbit.

Instead of course she's stepping up, stepping protectively past him to glare down the monster. "How dare you hurt my Tuxedo Kamen!"

Another blast is imminent, and he's only up on his knees. There is no possible way for him to get between them again, and there is no possible way for her to – for her to –

The impact comes.

It scorches the edges of his cape, forces him down again on his elbows and knees, and he's already crawling, desperate, oh god Chibi Usa –

The blast hasn't touched her.

Impossibly unharmed, she hangs on to the shielding body of a sailor soldier Mamoru has never seen before but immediately recognises.

It would be weird to see Seiya with a woman's curves, if they hadn't looked so utterly natural with Sailor Star Fighter's face.

The blast, which must have been almost point blank, has messed up her hair, left cuts along her arms.

He's still on his knees, rising, when she dumps Chibi Moon in his lap. His arms lock around her, he will never let her go.

"That's it, bastard! _Star serious laser!_"

The attack is fundamentally different from those of Serenity's sailor soldiers. This magic is not anchored on this earth, in this galaxy.

It works well enough in it, forcing the monster back.

Fighter is on it immediately, collecting another attack in her hand even as she swings at it.

He's been here before, so very many times. Throws a rose with almost the last of his energy, tips the balance a little in Fighter's favour.

His fingers are still shaking around Chibi Moon's body as Fighter finishes their opponent.

xxxxx

"I'm sorry, Mamo-chan." She's teary eyed, but not enough – doesn't understand what could have happened.

It makes a certain amount of sense, now that he's calm enough to think. Sailor Moon is reckless, Sailor Moon steps protectively in front of everyone and anyone without a plan, without forethought.

He searches for a supportive way to tell her that she is weak.

"Small lady!"

He looks up – they all look up – at Sailor Pluto approaching. With something that might be relief, Chibi Moon detaches from his impotently grasping hands and jogs over to Pluto.

"I'm glad to see you well, Small Lady." She nods at Fighter, who nods back, her grin bright but her shoulders wary. "I'm headed to join the Princess and the others. Shall I…?"

"Yes," Mamoru says. "Please do."

Pluto nods, holds out her hand for Chibi Moon. In seconds they're gone from him.

He's left on the broken asphalt with Fighter, pulls himself belatedly up on his feet to face her.

It is undeniably Seiya's face: Seiya's eyes, Seiya's expression.

Seiya's lipsticked mouth and Seiya's heavy breasts straining against what looks like black leather.

Seiya chances a grin. "We meet again."

"Yes." Is he looking? Surely he's not looking.

He's clearly looking, because Fighter's hand goes to her own breast, jingles it. "Uh, yeah. Boobs. I guess that's weird in these parts."

"Unusual. I'm sorry."

"It's fine. They're great boobs. Well worth an extra look, if I do say so myself."

"We should join the others."

"If you're up for it."

It's concern in her voice, but he can't hear it as anything but a challenge. "I'm fine."

"Great, let's go."

"Wait. I'm sorry. I'm grateful."

She blinks. "For what?"

"Chibi Moon," he grits out.

Seiya laughs, that breezy laugh that sweeps off the stage and thrills through hundreds of thousands of fangirls. They must actually like performing, the Starlights, or there'd be no reason for them to go on with it now. "My dashing rescue? Think nothing of it."

"Right. Right. I hadn't thought…"

Seiya stills then, the laughter melting away and then the memory of it. "You can't have thought I'd let her get hurt."

"No," Mamoru says, and then again because it's true, "No, that's not what I thought."

Seiya being in any way malicious to Chibi Moon, he can't imagine that. But Seiya actively looking out for her, actively shielding her – that's something else.

Seiya gives him a strange look, full of searing, serious vulnerability that reminds him uncomfortably of Usagi. "I'll be frank. I don't want the little rabbit to disappear."

Mamoru nods, because he's not intrusively honest like Seiya, isn't one to speak in order to challenge or make things uncomfortable. And there's no other way, no smooth way, to say, _Chibi Usa is the fruit of my union with Usagi, in which you want to replace me_. Mamoru would never have made him say that either.

Clearly his face says enough, despite the mask.

Seiya shrugs, mouth quirking in a complicated expression. "You don't have to be married to someone for the rest of your life to have a baby together."

xxxxx

His world has split open around him like an outgrown eggshell.

Seiya did that, without even meaning to. _You don't have to be married to someone for the rest of your life to have a baby together._

Once it's been said, it's so obvious.

These days, you don't even have to have intercourse in order to produce a child. There could be a fertility clinic, ten minutes in the bathroom with a cup and a magazine. It's entirely possible.

Chibi Usa could grow up perfectly healthy, grow up loved and wanted, with no need for him and Usagi to be married, to be dating, to be anything but friendly co-parents.

She could have siblings that were Seiya's or someone else's.

So many futures are possible.

xxxxx

It would have been good to go to America for a bit. Find his footing, away from the gravitational pull of a thousand years of loving Usagi, whose light is so blinding he sometimes barely sees her. To pull himself together, after Nehelenia and everything that happened… It's not the first time he's been kidnapped by an evil queen, who wanted him but wanted to hurt Usagi more.

A long line of someones who have taken him, made him theirs.

Usagi always saves him, of course. Rescues and cleanses him, so life can go back to normal.

Until the next evil queen sees him, and wants what Usagi has.

He remembers his possession by Queen Metallia as the only time he's been truly strong, on the same level as a sailor soldier. Black power that ate through him, hollowed him out, and how he was grateful because how else could he face Queen Beryl and all she wanted from him.

That was a long time ago.

He reminds himself of that sometimes, that it was a long time ago, and he's fine now.

The time he was most useful was when he held Chibi Usa, when his heart beat for both of them and his life force spilled golden and life-sustaining into her, while Super Sailor Moon and Sailor Saturn saved the Earth from the silence.

So it would have been good to go to America for a bit. Maybe to Europe.

But it's not going to happen now, he couldn't do that to his girls, and it's with these thoughts floating vague and frustrating through his mind that he happens to step onboard the cruise ship.

xxxxx

Perhaps it was a mistake to come.

He doesn't know anyone, but then wasn't that the point? The ship moves slowly under his feet, will be back in harbour tomorrow with its few hundred passengers.

He stands by the railing, watching the waters and occasionally the people, who are dressed up but not enough so that he sticks out; he came from Reika's dissertation, with a tie around his neck and champagne in his bloodstream, having discovered that he had no idea how to talk to anyone there.

_How are you, Mamoru? _

_Oh fine, fine, my future daughter almost died, killed by an alien monster because I was helpless to protect her._

_How was America?_

_I'm afraid I wouldn't know, I was murdered on the plane._

He tells himself it didn't use to be so hard to pretend, that he was friends with these people once – but the memory is fuzzy, intangible.

He's not the only one who's like this. Usagi used to have friends, he remembers the red-haired girl who was her best friend, her closest confident for years and years and whom now she can't have spoken to in months. The girl – Natsu? Naruko? – who loved Nephrite.

Dusk is descending when he catches sight of a stirring amongst the crowd, of something gleaming in its midst.

Well, of course. Of course it was stupid to think he could get away, leave his life behind.

Haruka-san detaches from the milling crowd, leaning insouciantly against the reeling next to him. It's a practiced pose, the setting sun gilding her white shirt, turning her hair into a halo.

"I trust you aren't here as the harbinger of doomsday news?" She snorts, stretching a little. "Though perhaps that would be preferable."

"No," he says, reminded that he's never been sure how Haruka-san really feels about high society. Michiru-san, still enveloped by the crowd, is such a natural fit, while he'd originally been surprised that Haruka-san didn't clash with it. "I'm just here."

"Mmh. You didn't bring the kittens."

He's not sure if it's a question. "No. It's just me."

Haruka-san's gaze drifts, caught again and again by Michiru-san, who moves around her admirers with what Mamoru thinks of as the easy poise of old money.

Supposedly he is old money, too.

Not Michiru-san's level of it, nor even Haruka-san's, but more money than most people have. He can't remember it.

He should be polite. It's easier now, in the buzzed anonymity, than it was at the dissertation. "Are you doing a recital?"

They are. It emerges that the owner of the ship, and incidentally quite a few other ships, is an old friend of Michiru-san's grandmother.

Frankly Mamoru would have preferred to run into them at a race track, if he had to run into them at all. That's how he first knew of them, watching Haruka-san race her bike. Something he watched for himself, disconnected from past death and glory.

Haruka-san makes her excuses, supposedly prompted by some invisible signal from Michiru-san, walks away on those long legs that have never lost a race.

Occasionally, he's considered selling his motor bike. He rarely uses it, it's an unjustified extravagance.

He felt so free on it once, but lately it feels like a mid life crisis. He's not like Haruka-san, it's not a passion.

Well, obviously he's not like Haruka-san. Haruka-san wins international championships as a hobby, as a distraction, the same way Mamoru drives around the block. He didn't even have the imagination to choose a different colour than ready-to-go red.

xxxxx

It's a beautiful recital.

Of course it is. All their recitals are beautiful.

He's curious, suddenly, to hear a Three Lights concert, to see Seiya and his friends on that stage. Slowly, surreptitiously, he hides ear buds under his hair, drowns out the classical masterpiece being played with three young voice searching for love, asking to be answered.

He can see how Usagi, who admires Michiru-san immensely but is soon bored with her music, would be caught by this. Lively, easy, autotuned songs, with an undercurrent that even Michiru-san's music doesn't have: the magic call, love and longing woven in a spell between every note.

It brings him back into the dream of the princess, before he'd seen her face. This was the longing corroding him, breaking him down to build up a prince who'd been dead for a thousand years.

xxxxx

Well, this is great.

He must have spent an hour wandering the halls when he bumps into them again. They're more relaxed now, in the dim light of lamps tuned down for the comfort of sleepy passengers, the topmost buttons of Haruka-san's shirt undone and her arm around Michiru-san's shoulders.

"Mamoru-san?"

"Were you looking for us?"

"No. No, not at all. I thought I might find a steward, there's been – it appears my room mate has had a little too much to drink."

The man had been asleep in Mamoru's bed, having previously vomited in his own. Mamoru was disinclined to disturb him.

Endymion speaks out sometimes, more majestically, but he's coming to understand that's how he was raised. There's no comfort in it, nothing natural.

"Oh dear," Michiru-san says. "I'm afraid they're booked quite full."

"I'm not surprised," Mamoru has to say. It's a less prestigious venue than Michiru-san's usual, it's a given that it's booked solid. "I'll find somewhere else."

"Why didn't you throw him out?"

"Haruka! Of course he didn't, Mamoru-san is a gentleman."

Her voice is playful, teasing at the very edge of cruelty. Haruka-san visibly responds to it, angling towards her like a compass needle trembling irresistibly north. Perhaps Mamoru isn't the only one who's had a bit of drink.

"Well," Michiru-san says then. "Of course you must come with us."

Her tone is such that he's three steps forward before he thinks to start demurring.

But he's tired and not entirely sober, with nowhere else to go, and her polite insistence is relentless. Haruka-san says nothing, going along fluidly with her partner's schemes.

These, he thinks, are the kinds of games they play.

It seems silly, after you've died for each other, but then – what's he doing here, himself?

He's ushered into a suite much nicer than he one he paid for, with two relatively large beds and a huge window. "Please," Michiru-san says, "make yourself at home. I'm sorry it's not much, but…"

"It's fine. More than fine. Thank you."

It's oddly refreshing to be treated as a child. Actually they are only a year older than Usagi, which would make him five years their senior, but it's easy to lose track of this fact. Rei too has this gift of acting uncannily adult.

Things are put in order with a minimum of fuss.

He takes care to be under the covers by the time they emerge from the bathroom – by the time Haruka-san emerges, having apparently forgot some article of her sleep clothes. Rather to his astonishment, she turns her back and pulls off her shirt to change. He must be making a face, a face she must be able to see reflected in the window, because she shrugs. "Let's not pretend you're interested."

There's no polite reply to that. The only recourse would be teasing, which he's no good at.

But he relaxes. He's always had the impression that he's irrelevant to Haruka-san, even more so than to the other sailor soldiers.

Maybe because she's so much an Outer, maybe because he's a man – they're past the point at which it's polite to pretend about that last. Even the Inners are giving up on that.

Like Haruka-san, Michiru-san wears the kind of nightclothes that suggests they normally sleep naked: the sort of sleep clothes that look good and are thus uncomfortable, bought for pyjama parties rather than actual sleep.

He politely averts his eyes as they get into bed. There's mumbling, voices and sheets, shifting: he's desperately aware that if this were a porno, now is when they'd ask him to join them.

That if he were not here, they would probably be – intimate.

That it's not entirely impossible, in the darkness, that they might be.

They do play strange games.

He hears himself asking, quite helplessly, "Were you like this before?"

"Like this?" Haruka-san repeats. "Mmh."

Surprisingly – although why should it be surprising – it's Michiru-san curled around Haruka-san, with, he thinks, her hand cupped loosely around Haruka-san's breast under the coverlet.

They always, he has come to understand, always knew who the other was, not like the Inners who were shocked fresh at each revealed face.

They certainly seem like they've known each other for a thousand years, although what does he knows about them really.

"Yes," Michiru-san says. "Always." She speaks into Haruka-san's shoulder, the words given the appearance and seemingly the effect of a kiss.

They were always like this, and they always knew. This is…strange. Well, different.

Endymion loved Serenity for a thousand years, but Chiba Mamoru was never interested in Tsukino Usagi. There was always something undefined between Tuxedo Kamen and Sailor Moon, but… Not like this. Not knowledge, not love.

It's difficult to think. His whole mission, his existential imperative as Tuxedo Kamen is to ensure her safety. He lives for her.

He was prepared, or thought he was prepared, to sacrifice everything in order to obtain the silver crystal, but in then end – well, there it is. Her mission, their mission, is to save the world. His mission is her, that's the extent of it.

xxxxx

"I must apologise again for the inconvenience." He's on steadier ground now, fully dressed and in daylight, the heat of his coffee burning his fingers through the cup.

"Not at all." Michiru-san smiles demurely. "On the contrary – my parents are worried I'll end up an old maid. They were so disappointed nothing came of the Three Lights concert, when Seiya-san visited."

Mamoru is highly doubtful of the veracity of these statements. Haruka-san's dark look does not alleviate these doubts in the slightest.

But in the end Haruka-san laughs, leaning back in her chair. "Well, at least he has good taste."

Michiru-san hides her expression behind her tea cup. "Are you talking about me or Usagi-san?"

Mamoru isn't good at prodding and he doesn't like to do it, but this is the first opening he's had, and anyway this is common knowledge, "You didn't like him."

Michiru-san smiles. "He was too much like you, hmm, Haruka? Too much competition." After a moment that stretches and stretches, never quite breaking, "No offence, Mamoru-san."

Haruka-san's fingers touch Michiru-san's around the tea cup as she steals it, brings it to her own mouth. "I didn't realise we were still concerned with competition."

Mamoru swallows.

"No, I didn't," Haruka-san says at last. "Charming other people's kittens is so rude."

Michiru-san laughs at her, and Mamoru knows then. It's all right now for Haruka-san to call Usagi her kitten, it's fine with Michiru-san and with Usagi and with Mamoru himself. It's all right now because Haruka-san is so definitely with Michiru-san.

Haruka-san might possibly have meant it once, but she doesn't anymore. This is reminiscent of how Usagi blushed at it once upon a time, not that it particularly bothered him, but she doesn't anymore.

Seiya means it. Seiya means every syllable of _Odango_ with every particle of his soul.

xxxxx

"Well," Luna says slowly. "Perhaps you should see this."

At first he doesn't understand what she means. Perceiving the toxic smell of Usagi baking, he'd thought she'd stopped him at the door in order to save his stomach.

That was before he heard the voices.

Usagi's loud and strident but edged with laughter, and then – yes, those must be Seiya's teasing tones, just as loud and only a little bit smugger.

For some reason he comes to a stop in the hallway. She'll notice him anyway in a moment.

"Are they done yet?" Seiya's crouching in front of the oven, trying to assess the cookies through the thick smog across the oven glass.

"No, dummie! They'll be done when the timer goes off!" Usagi swats at his shoulder, thought somehow it turns into a squeeze.

"Are you sure? I can practically hear them screaming in agony, devoured by flames."

His ubiquitous sun glasses are lying on the counter, getting smudged by flour and grease. Someone has forced him into one of Usagi's pink aprons.

Mamoru thinks how he's been in this position a million times – only no, he hasn't. Usagi bakes with the girls, then brings him the finished cookies. His hands have never been smeared with dough the way Seiya's are, certainly not his face.

"What do you know about baking, anyway?" Usagi demands.

"I know a lot about eating!"

"I noticed! You wolfed down half the dough, it's your fault if we don't get enough cookies!"

"I wouldn't have eaten it if you hadn't thrown it at me!"

"I wouldn't have had to throw it if you hadn't been drooling on it! It was a warning shot!"

Seiya laughs, trying to push hair out of his face and getting flour in it. "At least you have great aim ever since my expert baseboll tutoring." He pokes at the oven and then has to suck on his burnt finger, making a singularly childish face. "Are you sure they're not done? They're calling out to me to save them."

Usagi manhandles him away from the oven, reaching for a packet of frozen berries for his finger. "You're worse than Chibi Chibi."

Somehow or other they end up on the floor together, Seiya capturing her hand when she gives him the berry package and laying back with his head on her thigh. Mamoru doesn't usually pay much attention to what people are wearing, but the way Seiya's dark hair contrasts with her skin draws attention to her shorts.

It occurs to him, nonsensically, that Seiya has the same black hair, the same dark blue eyes, as Mamoru himself. Only he wears them very differently.

"Such a baby," Usagi mutters, trying to comb flour out of his fringe with her fingers.

"Mmh," Seiya says, apparently fine with being a baby. If his finger hadn't still been bright red, Mamoru would have been uncharitably prepared to believe he'd been faking the whole ordeal. "You could sing me a lullaby."

"Mmh," Usagi echoes, having seemingly given up on the flour but still fiddling with his hair. She hums a tune he recognises, one she must have mumbled over a sleeping Chibi Usa. When she slips into singing, her voice low and warm and filled with humming, in between words she must be forgetting, Seiya laughs.

It's a low, soft sound, he says, "Don't ever go into music" but it's all affection, the words sound like a lie because the tone is made for endearments.

"Afraid you couldn't handle the competition?"

He laughs again, steadier. "Oh trust me, I can definitely _handle _you. What I couldn't handle is the agonised crying of the world's musical critics."

"You!" She smacks his shoulder, but her mouth too is quirked into laughter.

Seiya beams up at her. Sings a few lines, and no, perhaps their hits aren't autotuned. His singing voice, fairly deep and clearly a man's, sounds absurdly like Fighter's.

"I like it," Usagi says eventually into the silence, thoughtful, somehow intense. "This one is more you."

"It's you." He swallows, covers it with a smile. "I wrote it about you."

There's a long, breathless moment, like the stuttering of a heart. Then they're past it.

They slip into conversation about school, some social science lesson. The teacher, and what someone said – and of all things, international relations. They're jabbering away simultaneously about Ms Something's insane homework demands and the video game whose boss she sort of resembles and her thoughts on the UN's role in the Middle East when the timer finally goes off.

The kitchen explodes into activity, Usagi and Seiya scrambling to get the cookies out and clear space on the table for them, constantly bumping into and brushing against each other as they move. It keeps looking like coincidence but it can't be, not taken together.

Finally the cookies, only a little burnt along the edges, have been poured onto a plate and given place of honour on the table.

All ten of their fingers are twitching, and it's no surprise to see either of them dive forward.

What is surprising, nullifying Mamoru's moment of sympathy for Seiya's unprepared taste buds, is how Seiya's face immediately crumples, spitting crumbs all over the table.

"Jesus, Odango," he hisses, weakly but with feeling, "are you trying to poison me?"

Mamoru must have eaten hundreds of these cookies over the years, always insisting they're fine, you're perfect.

"They're awesome!" Usagi insists, and manages to keep insisting for about two more seconds. "Okay, fine – ugh, where's Mako-chan when you need her? This _never _happens to her. So unfair!"

"We just need to accept that we have loftier destinies than this," Seiya says. "Our skills are too elevated for simple baking. Hmm, I should put that in the serenade."

"I keep telling you, no serenade."

"But I'm trying to be sensitive and understand your culture here! All your romance movies tell me serenading is the thing."

"Maybe in the eighties… Wanna go buy some cookies instead?"

"Hell yeah!"

The screeching of a chair, Seiya's belated lament over his dirty sunglasses, footsteps, "Oh! Mamo-chan. I didn't realise you were here."

xxxxx

They talk to each other like friends, he decides. Like people who take each other seriously and are interested in each other's opinions.

Like people who know each other and are good together, have fun together even when things go wrong.

There's nothing strange about this. There's certainly nothing wrong with it.

In fact, it's very nice. It would be very nice.

xxxxx

He feels dizzy, wrong-footed, as though he's stepped into a life that isn't his.

He was too late.

But let's be honest, that's not what's stopped him, stomped him.

He was too late and it didn't matter. Nobody will notice.

The sailor girls have been upgraded again and again, gone is the helpless Sailor Moon who trembled in front of minions and demons. Mamoru has not.

He has not, and so he is not needed.

Eternal Sailor Moon is detransforming, ribbons of magic like northern lights running over her skin before contracting into mundane clothes.

For a moment Sailor Star Fighter is backgrounded by impossible stars, a galaxy so alien this glimpse would make people seasick.

Then he's Seiya, in a perfectly ordinary high school uniform.

It's immediately clear that they were in the middle of a walk and of a conversation, that whatever battle they were involved in was a momentary distraction.

"I don't know about weird," Seiya says, arms behind his head. He slants a look Usagi's way. "It's a matter of habit? I guess it's twice the options, though actually Yaten will only do it as a girl."

Usagi's face is the colour of Sailor Moon's hair ornaments when she slaps his arm. "Seiya! You can't say things like that!"

It's interesting that she's not pretending not to understand, though.

"You asked!"

"I asked if it was weird, not if – if…! Anyway it is weird."

"I don't think so. It would be weird to be any other way."

"Mmh," Usagi mumbles. "Maybe."

They're walking very close together.

"So are you saying you're only attracted to me when I'm a guy?"

"No! I … Who says I'm attracted to you at all!"

Seiya's face is frank, the teasing easing away. "Aren't you."

Usagi says nothing.

Two steps later, three, her hand brushes Seiya's wrist. "Your attack… that's one of your stars you're channelling. From home."

"Yes. My star."

"It must be… it's terrible. You miss it."

"Yes," Seiya says, in a voice cold and strange as the impossible distances of the universe. "But I missed Earth when we went home, too."

Usagi's fingers close around his hand.

He smiles. "I'm doing all right here. Speaking of – the amusement park!"

It becomes gradually clear that the Three Lights have been asked to attend the opening of a state of the art amusement park, and event which evidently Yaten and Taiki feel is beneath them and to which Seiya, the enthusiast of the group, has now invited Usagi.

At this point in their lives, Mamoru must have accompanied Usagi to a dozen amusement parks. Sometimes even at his own invitation, though that was usually to make up for something.

It is quickly evident, strangely and devastatingly evident, that there's nothing indulgent about Seiya's invitation. He will ride the rides and win the eating contests and gorge himself on sugar, and he will love it. There's no pretence about it, or really about Seiya at all.

And it's a stupid thing that doesn't matter, whether someone enjoys amusement parks, but it's also everything, his whole existence, neatly encapsulated.

Mamoru has spent his tenure as Usagi's destined love being silent, calm, indulgent, secretly waiting, secretly… ashamed.

He has never opened up completely or teased or pushed, taken such an active part, _fought_ for it.

It's not wrong or worse, it's…simply not the same.

"Like you'd even have a shot at the hot dog contest," Usagi says. "You wouldn't be able to get into the costume afterwards, and then the fans would attack!"

She pokes his stomach. He catches her arm. You could call it a form of play wrestling, how they're struggling and – incidentally, surely – drawling closer. It is undeniably sexual.

Which, well, Seiya's always been clear that he wanted, so fair play to him.

And Usagi's grown into herself, now. It's only Mamoru had thought that would mean becoming Serenity, but it doesn't, and that's no one's fault. That's how it is.

This is how it is.

Perhaps it's for the best.

It ends rather abruptly, though the movements are slow. In theory they could be evaded, but they happen with the inevitability of a glacier following its natural course over the land. Seiya catches her face in his hands, knots his fingers in her hair.

He doesn't close his eyes when he kisses her.

Apparently Seiya doesn't share Mamoru's feeling of – not taking the kissing quite seriously. Usagi is little, and while they might both enjoy expressing tenderness towards each other, anything more than that would be unacceptable, impossible. At fourteen she was a child entrusted into his care.

Meanwhile Seiya is clearly excited.

Colour is high in both their cheeks as they break apart, Usagi's eyes bright with the possibility of tears.

"I can't do something like this," she says. "I'm not going to do this behind Mamo-chan's back."

"I know."

"Seiya…"

"This is not actually about Mamoru. This is about you and me." He swallows, brittle, never hesitating. "If I'm not who you want to be here with, then go."

He must know, they must all know, that she's not going anywhere.

Mamoru is the one who walks away, into a future gaping suddenly wide open, unlocked from the past.

He always knew he was part of a great love story. He just didn't realise he wasn't the hero, that it wasn't his story.

xxxxx


End file.
